"Your marriage. If you are mad enough to marry Brooks."
She mused. "Pip, do you remember the fat Armenian?"
"At Coney? Yes."
"He said that—I had reached for something beyond my grasp. That my fingers would touch it, but that it would soar always above me."
"Sounds as if Brooks were some fat sort of a bird. I can't think of him as soaring. I should call him the cock that crowed at Crossroads. Oh, it's all rot, Eve, this idea that love makes things equal. I went to the Hippodrome not long ago and saw 'Pinafore.' Our fathers and mothers raved over it. But that was a sentimental age, and Gilbert poked fun at them. He made the simple sailor a captain in the end, so that Josephine shouldn't wash dishes and cook smelly things in pots and hang out the family wash. But your hero balks and won't be turned into a millionaire. If you were writing a book you might make it work out to your satisfaction, but you can't twist life to the happy ending."
"I shall try, Pip."
"In Heaven's name, Eve! It is sheer obstinacy. If everybody wanted you to marry Brooks, you'd want to marry me. But because Aunt Maude and Winifred and I, and a lot of others know that you shouldn't, you have set your heart on it."
She flashed her eyes at him. "Is it obstinacy, Pip, I wonder? Do you know I rather think I am going to like it."
Her letters said something of the sort to Richard. "I shall love it down there. But you must let me have my own way with the house and garden. Don't you think I shall make a charming chatelaine, Dicky, dear?"
He had a sense of relief in her unexpected acquiescence in his decision. If she had objected, he would have felt as if he had turned his back not only on the work that he hated but on the woman he had promised to marry. It would have looked that way to others. Yet no matter how it had looked, he could not have done differently. The call had been insistent, and the deeps of his nature been stirred.
